The Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program offers students the opportunity to study a wide range of fields from the perspectives of feminist and LGBTQIA critical analysis, in a global context and with the purpose of promoting social justice. Students will learn how gender and sexuality are socially constructed, what these terms mean in various contexts, and how these concepts are used to support social and political institutions. They will also learn how critical analysis and creative questioning of these concepts can help to reshape those institutions.
Students will use the skills they learn in our classes to engage with such disciplines as anthropology, performing and media arts, English literature, Africana studies, comparative literature, Romance studies, music, Asian studies, industrial and labor relations (ILR), science and technology studies, sociology, government, history, history of art and many more. Because of the program’s interdisciplinary focus, our majors are often double majors, and go on to pursue careers in law, medicine or public health, development and international aid, media, research and community activism.
All majors and minors take courses in three key distribution areas of the program: lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies (LGBT); the study of intersecting structures of oppression including race, ethnicity and class (ISO); and global perspectives on feminism, gender and sexuality (GLO). These three areas assure that students understand a wider range of issues concerning sexuality and gender identity, the connection of human rights and social justice concerns across identities that are often represented as separate, and the global contexts for all of these discussions.
Department websiteSee all publications on SSRN.
2019. “‘There is a big question mark’: Managing Ambiguity in a Moroccan Maternity Ward.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
2018. “Aspirational Maternalism and the ‘Reconstitution’ of Single Mothers in Morocco.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 14 1 : 45-67.
2018. “Deploying the Fetus: Constructing Pregnancy and Abortion in Morocco.” Anthropology of the Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society. Han, Sallie, Tracy Betsinger, and Amy Scott, eds. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 200-226.
2016. “Sex Toys and the Politics of Pleasure in Morocco.” Abortion Pills, Test Tube Babies, and Sex Toys: Emerging Sexual Reproductive Health Technologies in the Middle East and North Africa. Wynn, L. L. and Angel Foster, eds. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
2015. “Medical Anthropology in the Middle East and North Africa.” A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. Soraya Altorki, ed. Boston: Wiley Blackwell Publishers, 207-232. With Marcia C. Inhorn.
Publications
“Queer Constellations, Cosmic Contacts: Trans-Forming the Narrative of Europe in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Meteoriten.” German Studies Review 48, no. 2 (forthcoming 2025).
“Gothic Cinema and Sexology in the Weimar Republic: Towards a Queer Gothic Aesthetic on Screen.” In Queer Gothic. An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Ardel Haefele-Thomas, 78–96. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.